Skip to main content

Look Up! Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard

By

 

Look Up!  Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard
by Annette LeBlanc Cate
Candlewick, 2013.  52 pgs.  Nonfiction

     What a scream.  In more ways than one.  Look Up! . . . is a spectacularly charming guide to bird-watching by an amateur birder, with hilarious bird remarks all along the way. The book begins before it even begins, inside the front cover with a list of what you need for efficient bird-watching (hold up on the binoculars; first, "practice seeing the whole bird . . . its shape, size, the way it moves . . . before you worry about all the little details). Next come Bird Watching Do's . . . and Don't's which include not walking through anyone's picnic while following a sandpiper, nor thinking an upside down shopping cart in the water is a cormorant.  Following are tips for listening for distinctive birds songs, recognizing birds by shape, the Modern Sparrow Field Mark Fashion Show, and the Bird Color Rainbow.  At the bottom of some pages are Wing Tips, suggestions for learning more, as well as Be a Birdbrain boxes describing ways that birds protect themselves and their young, how they make their nests and find their food.  Cate's drawings are witty after the fashion of Roz Chast--they are like tiny New Yorker cartoons for kids.  Children on up should find this book a pure delight, perhaps without noticing how much they are learning.  Even the index is funny.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Fowl Play

By
  Fowl Play By Kristin O'Donnell Tubb New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2024. Fiction 277 pages. Still reeling from her beloved uncle's death, Chloe Alvarez is comforted and confused when at his last will and testament reading, Uncle Will gifts her his African Grey parrot, Charlie. Charlie has a robust vocabulary and loves to make Alexa requests for her favorite songs, but when she starts saying things like, "homicide," and "cyanide," Chloe becomes convinced that Uncle Will may have met his demise by murder instead of a genetic disease, as was previously thought. Ultimately, bringing in her brother, Grammy, and Uncle Frank (and of course Charlie,) Chloe's ragtag and adoring family support her search for answers ---going on stakeouts, engaging in fast pursuits, and searching for clues. But as the suspects stack up and the mystery grows, Chole will learn that the process of death and grieving is complicated, and in the end her Uncle Will's words that, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more